“Every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type, and packet you route, is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.” Your day-to-day behaviour is monitored in ways you wouldn’t even realise, so these details and many… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Civil Liberties
Computer spyware is newest weapon in Syrian conflict
Discussion: In Syria, regime supporters have released computer viruses that are designed to rob information from targeted users and send it to a government-owned server. The information collected, such as user names, locations, and contact info, is then used by the regime to help fight protestors and activists in the country. This information is collected… Read more »
Your face is being tracked
Discussion: Your face is being tracked in many different ways. This article highlights six interesting and amazing ways that different technologies could be tracking your face. Facial recognition software allows companies to tailor its advertising to different customers, as well as tracking the clientele that frequent different businesses. This type of software even purports to be able… Read more »
Internet of things: Should you worry if your jeans go smart?
Discussion: There are many physical objects, or “things”, that are now on the internet with the help of RFID tags (referred to as the “Internet of Things”). Jeans, or another object that has an RFID tag, could potentially track a person’s every movement and broadcast its location 24 hours a day. Is this invasion of… Read more »
Our Web freedom at the mercy of tech giants
Discussion: Big media companies, and their political agendas, may have enough power to influence free speech on the web. These companies are currently dealing with the issue of whether or not speech involving slander, hatred or violence needs to be controlled. It is an issue of genuine economic and security concerns on the one hand with… Read more »
Cory Doctorow: DRM is no friend of business
Discussion: Digital Rights Management (or DRM) is a term used for the access controls over digital content and devices. Cory Doctorow, a highly respected personality in the technical world, believes that DRM is not successful as it is and is not beneficial to the business world. He states that there is unfair copyright restrictions in… Read more »
Starting a revolution with technology
Discussion: In early 2011 civil unrest in Egypt and the middle east let to political demonstrations that the Egyptian government believed threatening enough to the well being of the country that they shut down the World Wide Web in hopes of diminishing lines of communication between groups of protesters. OpenMesh, an ad hoc wireless mesh network of individual… Read more »
Are You Following a Bot?
Discussion: Can one person controlling an identity, or group of identities, really shape social architecture? Apparently, yes. Web Ecology Project recently organized a two-week social-engineering experiment to determine if it is possible to not only infiltrate social networks, but also to influence them on a large scale. Three teams created “social bots,” or fake identities,… Read more »
Report: iPhones secretly track their users’ locations
Discussion: A team of researchers at iPhone Tracker recently discovered that iPhones and 3G-enabled iPads appear to be tracking and storing data about their users’ whereabouts without their knowledge. Although most cell phone providers collect similar data as part of their operations, it is kept behind a firewall and normally requires a court order to… Read more »
My Life According to the iPhone’s Secret Tracking Log
Alex Madrigal, a correspondent with the Atlantic.com and iPhone user, downloads a map of his secretly-tracked life in the D.C. Metro area. Source: theAtlantic.com Date: April 20, 2011 Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/04/my-life-according-to-the-iphones-secret-tracking-log/237636/
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